Smother
by Penhales
Summary: Being alive makes her feel important.
1. Chapter 1

Being alive makes her feel important. She is the significant difference between an empty, silent room in a house in Minnesota and a bright, humming nursery. Her brain has not finished forming, and her words are sloppy and mumbled, giggled at her mother and father. His brain has finished its development, but there is a future fatal flaw. He puzzles at her gentle, infant grin and at her hands so small they only fit around one of his fingers.

He takes her hunting when she turns five, still too small to shoot, but big enough to reach out and touch the dark fur of the stag he'd taken down. There is nothing left but the white, polished rack before too long. It upsets her. He hangs it in the attic. It is the first.

It isn't too long before she is nineteen and smiling like she's nervous at the girl on the train. Her father watches with the eyes of the wolf, of the hunter, and she stares back with the eyes of the many they have hunted together. He sees all of them in her, and her in all of them, even as his hands wrap around their throats and their blood stains his cuticles.

She doesn't know how to embrace this, how to feel important again without feeling like a statue on a shrine. She holds her father's arm during church and holds back the desire to spit on the linoleum floor below their pew. For weeks and months she is nothing but slowly filling cardboard boxes and new clothing and graduation parties for strangers she calls friends. The phone rings and she answers and there is suddenly a flash of light as she bleeds deep wells from her throat and her father lies dead beside her and she has lost vision by the time the warm, certain hands are pressing on her throat, forcing the life back into her.

Being alive makes her want to be dead. Adult after adult comes in and out of her hospital room without knocking. There is no permission when she's hooked up to machines pulsing lifeless beats because she cannot even get the energy back to interject. She pretends to care for her ever-concerned psychiatrist even though she knows the façade is as good for hiding her true face as a sheer curtain would be. It does not matter.

He arrives behind the desperate consultant from the FBI covered in a haze. She knows he is hiding things she could never have seen in her worst nightmares, but it does not scare her. She is not afraid of death, so soon after staring it in the face.

When she kills, she feels the phantom wound in her abdomen, marking the exact spot of her sin. The dull ache resounds between her ribs and plays a macabre song that the FBI consultant longs to understand and the creature with the crimson eyes and sharp bones echoes back to her. Scales and feathers grow over his skin and he leaves traces of them for her on the books he hides in her hospital room for late night reading. She learns of Europe and forensic anthropology and shivers beneath stiff, over-starched hospital sheets. She is the abandoned runt of a litter of dead girls, the last surviving offspring, and she shivers under the weight of what that entails.

Being alive makes her feel at risk. He asks her to stay with him permanently. He wants to lure her down into his homicidal spiral, and she follows behind him faithfully. His stare has ripped open the stiches she's tried to apply to the wounds her father left, and she finds that it makes her feel wanted. He wants to take the fabric of her skin and make her into someone new. And she is going to let him, because her original creators never gave her enough, and he is offering so much.

He leans in close to her in the chill of her childhood home's kitchen, her own blood still staining the floor, and he presses the knife just beside her ear. He will not take her power away, after fighting so hard to help her win it back, but his own curiosity is getting the best of him, and she isn't safe anymore. Not with anyone.

So, he leans in close, and whispers,

"When I give the word, you must run."

She swallows and holds her breath and sees, for the first time, a man standing before her, his person stained with the blood of everyone he has ever touched. He is the difference between a cold and empty kitchen in Minnesota and a room that decides her fate. The flaw in his brain is revealed, and she sees it plainer than day. He does not love her, but she still stirs a love in him, buried far within. Abigail Hobbs is where he goes wrong.

She nods, at long last, and he takes a deep breath before the cold metal is making her spill familiar crimson life.

Being alive makes her feel important, as she runs through the woods, the wolf at her heels.


	2. Chapter 2

He has no family and no desire to create one. The few memories he has left of his parents are not happy ones, and the few left of his sister, more vivid than a fever dream. The long and crooked spectral fingers of his loneliness reach their way into his heart every day with the memory of her passing. It is as if she has always existed and as if she never existed at all, though, in a way, it is a blessing for him. There is no emptiness, there is only freedom. When he learns of her death he can still count on one hand the people he has outlived and from then he longs constantly to raise the count. People are pigs, no better than animals, sweating, biting, fighting their way up to the top of the food chain, and he is above them.

He is not sure where, along the lines, he develops his taste for blood, but it is there, all the same. Every day when he rises with the sun and the warming light envelops his bedroom through Eastern windows, he is pulled from hardened sleep with satisfying knowledge that there are no nightmares when he sleeps, even when he well knows that there should be. He wakes alone and untroubled by the unpleasant sensation of human company at the brink of consciousness. He is content with the rewarding reality that his time is his own and his bountiful inheritance will help him no matter where he wanders, which he does often. Houses full of priceless, or rather, astrologically expensive, antiques are abandoned as soon as the police begin to catch the trail, and he runs for years this way. A good hunter establishes his favorite kind of prey and then follows it, careful to avoid the watchdog along the way that might impede the catch.

The years pass by this way. Dust collects on books in his libraries and he sketches page after page after page for hours a day after his patients have all gone home, but the craving for creativity itself is never quelled without spilt blood. He has so many resources to draw from, with so many impolite impostors milling about in museums and opera houses. The crush of people who fill these places, desperate for a drop of culture in their small and insignificant lives, smelling so human and raw, like hormones and coffee and cheap perfumes his sensitive nose can hardly stand. An unlucky woman bumps into him without apologizing. He catches her arm and charms his way onto her Rolodex because, frankly, he's hungry again. He breathes deep her scent when the wind catches it as they stand outside of the opera, and she doesn't notice, as they never do. She smells somewhat sharp and nearly like citrus. A light supper for a warm summer evening, he wants to serve her in a cold dish with a rich, spicy sauce.

He becomes aware of a new competitor in his area, an artist with a taste for creating an elaborate tableau, and he admires the man immensely. He follows the killer's progress through the papers and when the FBI is on the other end of his phone line he smiles triumphantly. His last brush with the FBI had ended unfortunately, without a chance to create the art that Garrett Jacob Hobbs now created with such ease. He couldn't be doing it all without some help. Only light research is needed to find the daughter.

But there is Will Graham, and he is deliciously interesting. Will resists immediately when he reaches for him and that intrigues him all the more. Will Graham cannot be taken control of easily and will present a challenge, an entertainment, for months to come. He is malleable and breakable and so sweetly broken already. He revels in Will's brokenness and indulges the part of him that wants to control and twist until it gets its way. It's so refreshing to have the kind of victim who allows himself to be eaten from the inside out by a false malady, for he is Will Graham's creeping sickness. The flaw in his little heaven of dominion over the hawks of justice is found when Will has to help someone.

Will wants to save anything and everything that falls into his path, and he is that way about the girl's mother, even in her (clearly) last remaining moments. He reaches for her, expecting his trailing companion to take over where he cannot after the call of another victim rings out, but his companion does no such thing. This woman will be Garrett Jacob Hobbs' final casualty, as she was destined to be from the day she chose to marry him. He, in a manner of speaking, does not expect it when the daughter is the one Hobbs is holding as a victim. She's different from the plain and wind beaten surrogate daughters that Hobbs has slain so far because her eyes are wide and vast and deeply blue. She is like a white doe in a slew of fallow brown fawns, but then the blood is staining the bright white deep red and Will Graham is at her very mercy, his shaking hands trying to hold the blood inside of her. His hands are shaking too much and he's ruined Hobbs' last attempt at art, and so he kneels down and, pushing Will out of his way, puts the pressure on her wound.

She is nothing like Mischa and everything like Mischa and he is disgusted with himself for drawing any connection at all. He invests himself in her potential and finds himself with two toys to play with to distract from the empty nights with nothing but the sketchbook that brought his original downfall with Miriam Lass. He won't be as careless, and he is ever so careful with Abigail and Will. Things are complicated by Abigail's decision to try to be on his level.

He wants her to trust him, inexplicably, and he does things to earn her trust because it is an asset. If she believes she is safe, she won't see the sneaking hunter behind her. And that is what he is even when she spends her first night in his house and he is curled around her as she sleeps. He has so much power when he denies her the things she wants, but he cannot make himself deny her help when she messes up and takes Nicholas Boyle down. It's no risk to him, but it's everything to her, and he thrives on his choke-hold on her. Will remains above, always above. A testament to his ability to hold only certain ones in his heart. Will is dear to him, and as is Abigail, even as she craves and asks for so much, like a child.

Will Graham resides in the heavens of justice and Abigail Hobbs is down in the pit with him, having descended of her own accord. He is not sure that he wants her there. He touches her without realizing his hand has ever moved and he hates himself deeply for having human needs and reflexes. When he wears Will's blood, it is sweeter than being anointed with holy oil. When he wears hers, it burns his skin like acid and it satisfies nothing. There is no communion in causing Abigail to bleed. The sweet release he usually finds in the deaths of others cannot be found in her.

He tells her to run because he hasn't the heart to do it, in the end. She's still growing into the muse for a new work of art, unripe and unready. She's too much like his sister and there is painful love left because of it. He will catch her, as surely as a wolf can catch a wounded deer, but Abigail is still different from Mischa Lecter, the doe perished in a past life.

Abigail had grown claws and many sharp little teeth.


End file.
